Tag Archives: wine

Welcome to the very first edition of the Gnip Cagefight! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll select a common word pair to enter the Gnip Octagon to fight to the finish in a no holds barred battle of Tweets. Two words will enter. Only one will leave.

In addition to crowning the victor, we’ll also call out some of the fun, interesting, strange, and bizarre trends that we glean from the data. Leave us a comment with any contenders you’d like to see in the future.

Now without further delay, let’s dive into our first Gnip Cagefight… Put your hands together for Wine vs. Beer!

And the Winner is . . .

We looked at one week of Tweets that contained the words “beer” or “wine,” and beer was the more commonly used term, appearing in 53.1% of those tweets vs. 48.1% for wine. Now you might be saying, “Hey, that’s more than 100%!” You are correct! That’s because beer and wine appear together about 13,801 times–along with an uncomfortable hangover, we presume. (Is this an opportunity to sell aspirin?)

With beer as our victor, we wanted to answer the age old question . . .

What time is Beer Thirty?

To answer this question, we analyzed the volume of Tweets containing the term “beer” throughout each day and averaged that across the week’s worth of data we collected. Each Tweet’s time was moved into the time zone of the Tweeter and normalized against the daily cycle of Tweet volume. Based on the graph below, true beer thirty is 5pm local time. This gives great meaning to the saying “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”

Beer Drinkers have a Wider Vocabulary than Wine Drinkers

Another fascinating tidbit that came out of the data was that beer drinkers have a wider vocabulary than wine drinkers. Normalizing for the number of words used, we find that beer drinkers use 14% more distinct words than wine drinkers. Wine drinkers tend to use the same idioms, for example, “glass of wine” or “red wine,” more than beer drinkers use their most common phrases. Does this mean that beer drinkers are 14% smarter than wine drinkers? Or that they use very creative spelling? We won’t wade any further into that question, but you can be the judge.

That’s all for our inaugural Gnip Cagefight. Hope you enjoyed it and be sure to let us know what what words you’d like to see in the octagon in the future.